The Tao of Nature

Last update: 18 Sep 2013 10:02 UTC

What is this all about?

This page serves as an initial repository for brainstorming The Tao of Nature (not necessarily the final name) - a permaculture/nature simulator, that works as a playable game.


What's the purpose?

There are many reasons why I would find this simulator useful, here are some of them:

How would it work?

View

The main view could either be a top/birds-eye view, like in SimCity for example, or a frontal view of a planet "slice".

With the top view, the playable map would be rectangular, and the player could visualize how things spread over space. Perhaps having differente visualization layers to analyze temperature, soil quality, humidity, etc. In the front planet view, the map goes in a full circle, but the distribution of the elements are just to the left and right, there is no depth. The advantage is that with this approach the player could also see the soil itself, roots, etc, as it is all part of the slice. I'll draw some sketches to make this clearer.

One other option would be to have a 3d planet, but the complexity of such thing would be too high to be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time.

Play modes

The game will have a free sandbox mode, where the player can, essentially, play around making experiments and see what happens. It can be used to test thing, learn, etc.

To make it more of a game, it can also have specific missions, for example, a mission to prevent the spread of a desert, other for recovering a forest of a devastating fire. The player would have a time deadline to achieve a specific result, and would have to find out what kind of actions would help nature in recovering faster.

What can the player do
In order to ACT, the player can interfere and change the game "world". A few ideas I have right now are:
Other loose ideas
Contribute!

I'm looking forward to also hear from the community some feedback on this. What do you think could make this work? What would add more value? If you'd like to contribute in some way, or be informed of further development, get in touch with me at: nunodonato [at] myopera.com